We’ll write more comprehensive updates on this as time progress, but we just wanted to introduce to you Vincent Deguin. Vincent is an OU research student, and his PhD is investigating protoplanetary ice. To us mere mortals, this means looking at icy particles, how they would interact in space to form larger bodies, and then planets (hope I’m not explaining this really badly Vincent!)

Vincent Deguin

Vincent showed me a little of his lab yesterday where he has created experiments to look at this, and a further step with his work is then to look at the interaction of the particles in zero gravity. There are various ways of doing this; obviously the best is to actually get something into space, but this is very expensive of course. To get a little bit of data, a parabolic flight will give brief moments of zero gravity, and this is what we will be contributing with our rocket flying in the Spaceport America Cup.

We also hope to be testing a new camera that is key to getting the data from the experiment. The ‘Payload Challenge’ is a competition within a competition at the Spaceport America Cup, and we hope that our entry will score well on scientific merit.

Vincent will do a proper update about this himself, but we just wanted to introduce him, and the experiment to say why it’s important that we can raise the funds to go and do this.